Digital Frontiers

Does the Internet, with its plethora of information about any subject you could possibly want to know about, stifle your creativity?

You can find out anything on the Internet, from how to cut your own hair (I just buzzed my own hair yesterday) to how to write a blog post. Anything you want, you can learn on the Internet. People can showcase their skills, and express their ideas.

However, there are so many people using the Internet today, so many ideas getting posted and shared, that it’s hard to find a fresh, new idea these days. Most of what I personally see on the Internet today is simply iterative efforts, or taking someone’s already made idea and improving on it or changing it in a small way to make it slightly unique.

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For example, take the iPhone App Store. When it first opened, there was a gold rush of new apps and new ideas of how to use the iPhone’s capabilities and features. Apps like RedLaser or Bump allowed users to use the iPhone’s camera and bluetooth connections to scan barcodes to find cheaper prices for products, and to easily share contact information.

Today, there are over 150,000 apps in the App Store. Most of the new, creative ideas are already taken. For example, the Twitter clients and tip calculators and flashlight apps are all the same: they do the same basic features, but most of the apps are simply taking the already existing product and making something new. This does slightly stifle creativity, because a lot of people just copy what already exists and hope they can make money, but it also allows for people to improve on existing apps and share their new ideas.

It’s a double edged sword, the Internet. On one end, you have access to so much information, but on the other end, you have so much information and so many ideas that are already out there, that you may feel that there is no “fresh” idea you can come up with. I have this problem when brainstorming for new iPhone app ideas. Most of my ideas are to improve on other people’s apps. I only hope that the App Store doesn’t become completely filled with Twitter clients and tip calculators.

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Imagine: when you were a child, you saw the shoes in the store, the ones with the wheels inside. Pop out the wheel, and you can quickly glide on the ground, and quickly get anywhere! Now imagine that you can get around faster with jet propulsion thrusters built into your shoes! With cars being inefficient methods of transportation, polluting the environment and wasting energy, nothing is better than a clean, efficient jet pack thruster planted inside your shoe to help you get to places even faster than cars.

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If I had to market a product with no marketing budget, I would turn to social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Using these tools, such as making a Facebook Fan Page, and a Twitter feed, I could let fans know about the product, and be able to market it worldwide. I would have users leave reviews on the site about their experiences with the product, and the communication between users would spread, and raise brand awareness. Taking the control of the marketing out of my hands and giving it to the users will show that I am open to suggestions and don’t ignore my users.

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The Internet. Some say its a “series of tubes,” or the “information superhighway.” It’s how communicate with others around the world at light speeds, how we can learn from the billions of pages of information, even how we find entertainment and express ourselves creatively.

For some, its those reasons, but the increasing trend in the United States and abroad is that the Internet is simply becoming a major part, if not one of the most significant parts of your everyday life. With the rise of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, using the Internet becomes a part of the average person’s daily routine, along with other tasks such as showering and going to school/work.

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One of the issues that has recently come to the forefront of discussion is the right to freedom of speech on the Internet. Before, the fact that anyone can be anonymous on a website or forum made way for flame wars and general bashing, because the user wasn’t accountable for their words. However, recently websites are pushing more for registration, giving benefits to those who do, or restricting them from the website completely if they do not register. This allows users to be accountable for their words, and will mentally affect how they “speak” on the Internet, because their words will represent them.

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If the Internet were to be regulated by some sort of committee/board/organization, it would seriously affect free speech on the Internet. The mental effect that being accountable for your words on the Internet would force people to mediate their speech, and people would start editing their words before they posted something. It also brings up the question about the consequences that could be issued: fines, limit/cutoff Internet access, etc.

It’s a new, unknown medium of communication and information. Freedom of speech is just one of the many questions that needs to be answered in the coming years.

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User Generated Content – “various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users.”

The prime example of user generated content is Wikipedia. With millions of pages created by thousands of users, Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia that is very accurate. Any user can edit and add to a page, or create a page for a topic that does not exist. If there is incorrect information on a page, it can be quickly corrected.

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Does it suck if everyone helped make it?

With this movement towards “crowdsourcing“, it begs the question: “Does it suck if everyone helped make it?” Is Wikipedia truly as accurate as it should be? With students citing Wikipedia articles for their term papers, teachers using articles for their lectures, and the fact that for most people, Wikipedia is the first stop for looking a specific topic up, the accuracy of the articles comes into question. How accurate can something be if everyone had a hand in creating it? On one hand, crowdsourcing the articles allows the collective mind of the people to contribute what each person knows, and if there are any errors, it can be easily corrected by someone who knows what’s right.

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Crowdsourcing Your Advertising

With such powerful community platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, businesses should take advantage of the huge user base that these platforms have to advertise their products. One example of a business that does this is One Greek Store, a local Gainesville business. They specialize in custom Greek gear, such as line jackets and hoodies, and also do custom embroidery.

One Greek Store (OGS) uses a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter to inform their customers about new merchandise and current deals & discounts. Some of their customers use the Facebook Fan Page wall to post reviews and comments about the quality and service OGS provides. When these users leave feedback and reviews, it shows up on their friend’s news feeds, allowing them to become fans of OGS, spreading the word, raising brand awareness, and ultimately increasing sales.

I feel that this is a very effective method of utilizing social media platforms to drive your marketing and business, because it allows the users to have conversations that are “elegantly organized.”  OGS doesn’t have to spend money on advertising; it can crowdsource their advertising to their fans and customers. As more people converse about the business on the fan page, the more the word spreads.

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Conversion Marketing. Sounds complicated right? Wrong.

Conversion marketing is when the consumer takes the marketer’s desired action. Examples of these “actions” include making an online purchase, creating a user profile, or participating in an online discussion on the site. Using online website analytics such as Google Analytics, we can track how successful our online marketing strategies are working.

For example, for Leonardo’s, we are going to be making Twitter and Facebook accounts for each of the three different Leonardo’s locations: Leonardo’s 706, Bistro 1245, and Leonardo’s by the Slice. Leonardo’s will use these social networking mediums to inform their customers about coupon deals and menu items. Using Google Analytics, we can track how successful these strategies are; we can track how many customers visit the Twitter page to see new deals; we can track how many customers go to the Facebook page to leave reviews and feedback.

Analytics is a great way to quantify the success of your online marketing strategies. We can see how effective our websites are, whether visitors actually sign up for accounts, leave reviews and feedback, etc., and can change up the strategy in response to the statistics. If customers aren’t doing the desired “action,” then we can determine why they aren’t doing that action, whether it be an unintuitive user interface, ugly site, etc.

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Overview

Leonardo’s 706 is a local Gainesville business that serves delicious Italian food. They have three locations, one is their main restaurant, one is a bistro, and one is the famous Leonardo’s Pizza by the Slice location on University Ave. Pizza by the Slice is right next to the Kangaroo Gas Station at University Ave & 13th St., and is very convenient for students because it is within walking distance from campus. Their menu is also very affordable, with one slice of pizza (which is very large itself) costing only a few dollars.

A quick google search of Leonardo’s yields their very primitive, html-based website, and a few listings on restaurant review sites such as Yahoo! and Urbanspoon. The website consists of the menus from their three restaurants, and allows you to see pictures of the different menu items. However, many of the picture links don’t actually show pictures of the food, just the Leonardo’s logo; only the pizza items seem to work.

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Strategies

There are things that Leonardo’s can do to raise brand awareness and engage their customers:

• Remake their website to include a forums page – users can post their suggestions for new pizza recipes, trade recipes with each other, and foster communication
• Have a contest – the person who makes the best pizza, judged by the Leonardo’s cook, can have their recipe on the Leonardo’s menu
• Have a rotating section of the menu with new items that customers vote for
• Use social networks like Twitter to send out coupons – people who bring in their phones showing the coupon or remember the coupon code can get a discount
• Have a promotion similar to Ben & Jerry’s BJs in your PJs

These are just some of the things that they can do to engage their customers and learn from them. By giving control to the customers, they can create a menu that they will want to eat from. The customers will become the advertisers, and will raise brand awareness through word of mouth.

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iPhone. Quite possibly the best innovation to happen to the mobile industry since the invention of the smart phone. With the iPhone came the App Store, and developers swarmed over it’s SDK, and created over 140,000 apps in less than two years. That’s more than the Blackberry and Android markets combined!

Before the iPhone, mobile markets were a mess. The apps were horrible and ugly, and there were fears of getting viruses from a downloaded app. The App Store gave iPhone users a unified market where they could safely buy their apps, which have all been tested by Apple Staff. Testing the apps before letting them hit the market ensured that every app ran properly, performed its function, and did not compromise the users’s privacy or security.

Mobile development is an industry that I would like to have a career in, and I have already taken a step towards that career: I made an iPhone app that is currently in the App Store. I hope to make more apps to build up my portfolio and gain necessary programming experience.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, it changed everything. Before the iPad, developers only had to design apps for one platform, one screen size. Now, we developers have to redesign our user interfaces and use new UI elements and controls to take advantage of the extended screen real estate.

Apple is constantly innovating: two years after announcing the original iPhone, they announced the iPhone 3G, a new incremental improvement that meant a faster phone and a much faster data network. The iPad is a game-changer to the mobile market, shaping the industry in a new way. It creates the bridge between the iPhone and the MacBook Pros and iMacs. Developers will have to change their design paradigms when moving from iPhone to iPad, just like they did when they transitioned from Mac to iPhone.

I hope one day to work for a company in Silicon Valley, making iPhone apps or iPad apps or i-whatever apps. Whatever Apple can cook up for us developers and consumers, I can’t wait to make programs for it.

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Our assignment: Create as much “value” in one hour using only Post-It notes.

When Adam told us our assignment, I thought he was kidding us. The assignment seemed too ridiculous for it to be real, but when he pulled out actual Post-It notes from his pocket, I started panicking inside. I am not generally a very creative or artistic person, and the idea of such an open-ended assignment scared me a little. As I looked around at the other groups, I saw that they were all smiling to each other because they already had ideas as to how to create that “value.”

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Panicking

As we left the classroom, I met up with my other two group members: Matt Garrett & Matt Mills, and they had the same reaction as I did: “What the hell?”

The other groups took off, some sitting on benches just outside to brainstorm, others that already had their ideas went to implement them, while we just stood there. None of us had thought of any ideas right away, so we started walking towards Turlington.

We tried thinking of ideas to bring value for Digital Frontiers, but we realized that Digital Frontiers was more of a vehicle that allowed us to bring value than something that needed value itself. Without this class, we would probably never have had an assignment like this. When we reached Turlington, I had an epiphany: Haiti.

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Eureka!

With the recent earthquakes in Haiti, the small country was in despair. Already recovering from the recent hurricanes, the earthquakes just put them into more misery.

There is a text-messaging fund designed to help those affected in Haiti: Text “HAITI” to 90999. Although it is heavily publicized on the news, there may still be people who don’t keep up with the news (like me), or may not know exactly what to do or what the program is all about.

The message of the program is simple: Text the word “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross. What a perfect thing to promote and bring value to!

We decided to go to the tunnel under 13th by Norman Hall, and write “Text ‘HAITI’ to 90999″ on the graffiti wall to spread awareness.

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Execution

With our idea in our heads, we set off for Norman Hall. After about 45 minutes of posting and writing, we were finished. At one entrance of the tunnel, we had the word “HAITI” spelled out in Post-It notes, with messages such as “Text ‘HAITI’ to 90999″ and “To Donate Ten Dollars”, and the other side had “TEXT HAITI TO 90999″ spelled out in Post-It notes.

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Lessons

Having such an open-ended assignment thrust upon me with such a short time frame to complete it really challenged me to think of new and creative ways of expression. I learned that pressure can inspire someone to come up with the best ideas, and having our ideas restricted to using only Post-It notes forced us to be more creative with our marketing strategies.

I hope that at least one person will read our “graffiti” Post-It note messages and actually text their donations, because if one person donates, this effort will all have been worth it. I’m sure the people in Haiti will agree how valuable every donation can be.

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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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About Me

Hey, my name is Daniel Byon, and I am a sophomore Computer Science major.

Involvement

I am a newly inducted member of Pi Delta Psi Fraternity, Inc. here at UF. I am also involved in several AASU (Asian American Student Association) suborganizations, such as CASA (Chinese American Student Association), FSA (Filipino Student Association), VSO (Vietnamese Student Organization), and KUSA (Korean Undergraduate Student Association). I am a co-events coordinator for CASA, and I help plan and run social events for CASA members. I have a job at One Greek Store on University Ave., where I help make greek gear such as custom line jackets and embroidery.

Technology Background

I have been using computers since I was seven years old, when I used to play computer games on my dad’s Pentium II, Windows 95 computer. I used PCs all throughout middle and high school, and once I got a MacBook Pro for college, I never turned back. I started programming in spring of last year, when I took the CGS 2421 C++ programming course, which coincidentally motivated me to change my major from Business Administration to Computer Science. I developed an iPhone app called “Formulus Free – Formulas for Calculus”, which is a study guide for students taking Calculus 1 & 2. The app has done fairly well, with over 100,000 downloads. I also developed another iPhone app, this time an alarm clock that lets the user set their own music; however, the app was not well written, and I ended up taking it off the store.

Social Media Usage

Currently, I use mostly Facebook. I have a Twitter account, but like most social networks, people gravitate to the services that their friends use. Most of my status updates are “Twitter-like”, such as I’m going to class, or going to eat. I don’t really use Twitter much, and post tweets maybe once a week. I’m not really into photography, so I don’t use Flickr.

What I Hope To Get Out Of This Class

As I said earlier, I like to do iPhone development. I hope to start a company someday, and know that using social media is crucial for iPhone app marketing. Social media will be the primary tool that I will use to promote and spread the word about my works, and I hope that this class will show me the strategies and critical thinking skills I need to excel in the business world.

My Links

Facebook – facebook.com/danielbyon

Twitter – @danielbyon

iPhone App – Formulus Free – Formulas for Calculus

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