Caroline made me do it

Everybody has that one friend. They are usually the person who knows all about anything remotely new immediately. This is the person you ask before you buy anything electronic or gadget related for example. They always know what’s the most up-to-date product on the market and more than likely have some experience utilizing it in their day-to-day life because they waited in line the day it came out so they could be one of the first to try it. Some would call these people “hipsters.” Hipsters are those who knew about that new thing before it was cool to know about said new thing. Technically hipsters shy away from mainstream culture and trends, but in doing so, they often end up dictating culture and trends. An example is “distressed” denim (jeans with holes in them.) This style was made popular because hipsters shunned mass department stores and favored thrifting clothes, which were in various states of disrepair or “distress.” The look became popular and viola – now you know how American Eagle and Hollister came up with holey jeans! Hipsters are just a form of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are defined as “a person whose opinions about something such as a product or issue have a big influence on the opinions of others” (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/opinion-leader.) They come in all shapes and sizes. The guy that works at the Apple Genius Bar who showed you how awesome Apple Music actually is is technically an opinion leader. Your local barista who made you try that coffee drink you didn’t think you would like but now love is an opinion leader. If they influenced you to try, buy, or in general change your mind about something, they are considered an opinion leader. But how do these opinion leaders operate in today’s social media saturated world?

I’m going to give you an example of an opinion leader that I utilize quite frequently to demonstrate how opinion leaders utilize social media. I am big into skincare. I’m the girl who doesn’t think twice about dropping $85 on an ounce of serum in the name of good skin. I’ve been a follower of Caroline Hirons for just over three years now (check out her blog here.) She’s a big deal in beauty land. She’s a 40-something mom of four, who worked retail for years and is now a trained facialist and makeup artist. She has a blog and YouTube channel which amass millions upon millions upon millions of views each year. She’s witty, but down to earth. She’s no nonsense when it comes to product reviews and she’s built an almost cult following. When she recommends a product, it’s almost guaranteed to sell out within the week, if not the day. It’s been dubbed “the Caroline effect” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-3344840/I-m-beauty-s-answer-Delia.html.) She has an amazing instinct for knowing what women want out of a product and she goes out of her way to make sure the reviews she writes are thorough, honest, and always enjoyable to read. Caroline is an avid social media user. When she posts a new review on her blog or a new YouTube video with her current skincare favorites (my personal favorite videos) she makes sure to let her followers know. She posts an Instagram story about it, a photo or video snippet to Instagram, tweets out the link, and boom! Thousands of women immediately have a new favorite product. Caroline’s background in the industry (she’s a trained facialist, has worked with dozens upon dozens of brands, and has industry cred) allow her to be a trusted opinion leader, as does her overall personal narrative. Personal narratives go a long way in making opinion leaders. Personal or “character” narratives are defined as “enduring personal stories or accounts that we may understand as being related to particular expressed character types” (Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities.) Caroline’s character narrative is that of a guru, helping guide us all to the land of good skin, while maintaining her wit and charm as a working mom.   It establishes a connection with her and allows us, as her readers/followers, to understand her not only just as a product reviewer but as a friend, somebody you would want to grab a drink with. People trust their friends, and I trust Caroline Hirons to a fault.

Sorry to wax poetic up there, but my devotion to Caroline Hirons is a great example of opinion leadership and how it can impact the market. The “Caroline effect” I mentioned above? That effect is what companies who get reviewed by Caroline come to expect. It means your products are about to fly off the shelves and your profits are going to soar. It’s a very, very good thing. It’s also fairly cheap marketing. By having somebody like Caroline, who has already done the work of cultivating a captive audience, utilize your product, you as a company can capitalize on the after effects. Opinion leaders like Caroline are partaking in a form of Word-of-Mouth communication. For more than half a century it’s been maintained that Word-of-Mouth affects the majority of all purchase decisions (Networked Narratives.) People like Caroline just do it online now versus in person. The advent of social media has changed the way in which most of us partake in Word-of-Mouth interactions. Now instead of calling that hipster friend of yours to discuss whether or not you should buy into the hype of the newest iPhone (what are we on now? 7? 8?) you can just browse online for your favorite tech blogger or scroll through your YouTube subscription box until you find that one channel with the Genius Bar guy you love to watch on weekends. Trust is being formed online with people like Caroline Hirons every day. There’s a reason why YouTube beauty gurus are able to afford $1 million houses (Zoella anybody?) Consumers trust their opinions and brands know that. Utilizing these online, social media opinion leaders can only help brands and their marketers. Is there a potential for blow-back? Sure. But at the end of the day, isn’t any press good press?

I hope you all enjoyed my take on opinion leaders and social media. See you next week for another post!

Source:

Kozinets, Robert V., et al. "Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities." Journal of Marketing 74 (2010): 71-89.

Guess who's back?!

Remember how I said I might not be updating as frequently as I used to last week? Surprise! I’m still going to be posting here once a week on http://paigewester.blogspot.com/ for a little while longer! If you’re new to my neck of the Internet woods you can go read a little about me on my About Me page or go read my first post titled “I am not throwing away my shot” (which, yes, is a Hamilton reference.) If you remember, this blog started out as a way for me to work through different types of emerging media that are available and how we, as strategic communicators, can utilize them to their full potential. I would now like to take the blog and turn it around a little bit. I would like to focus these next few weeks on Leadership and Media Strategies and how we can utilize these strategies in our day-to-day lives as strategic communicators for various organizations.

Diffusion of Innovations theory. Did you just die a little on the inside, because I know I did the first time I read that phrase. Diffusion of Innovations theory is actually pretty interesting though if you give it a chance and can be one of the most useful theories for us as strategic communicators. It effects just about everything in our lives, from technology we use to the food we eat. Plus, it’s a great jump off point for us with this new blog direction! Diffusion of Innovations theory is based off work by Dr. Everett Rogers. Originally published in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations (1995,) the theory itself offers three valuable insights: what qualities make an innovation spread, the importance of peer-peer conversations and peer networks, and understanding the needs of different user segments (A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations.)  So let’s break down the theory and what this all means for us.

Diffusion is defined as “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Diffusion of Innovations.)  Essentially diffusion is how things like new advances in technology, etc. are trickled down into mainstream society. There are four main components found within this diffusion definition provided by Rogers: innovation, communication channels, time, and social system. All these elements culminate to form the Innovation-Decision Process (Detailed Review of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations Theory and Educational Technology-Related Studies Based on Rogers’ Theory.)  The Innovation-Decision Process is a five step one: 1) knowledge 2) persuasion 3) decision 4) implementation and 5) confirmation. Each of these steps in the process is also accompanied by five characteristics of innovations: 1) relative advantage 2) compatibility 3) complexity 4) trialability and 5) observability. Since I just listed two lists I’m not going to bore you with the intricate details of each one. For the most part they are fairly self-explanatory but if you are interested in going in depth about any of these concepts I highly suggest checking out any of the readings listed above.

The main focus that I want to talk about concerns the Innovation-Decision Process and those who embark on this process. First up are the innovators. These are the visionaries, the dreamers. The innovators “often lavish great time, energy and creativity on developing new ideas and gadgets. And they love to talk about them.” To me, the innovators are the Steve Jobs types. Next you have the early adopters. These are the people who are always “on the lookout for a strategic leap forward in their lives or businesses and are quick to make connections between clever innovations and personal needs.” AKA Hipsters. These are the people who knew about stuff before it was cool to know about them. After the early adopters you have the early majority-the rest of us who are “pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but won’t act without solid proof of benefits.” Between the two “early” categories you have almost half of the population who participate in a given Innovation-Decision Process. Now let’s move on to the other half.   The late majority “are conservative pragmatists who hate risk and uncomfortable with your new idea.” These are the people who take a lot of work to adopt any kind of new anything. The want to fit in though, so eventually they’ll come on board. Last but not least are the laggards. What a nice name right? These are those guys who “hold out to the bitter end” (A Summary of Diffusion of Innovations.) These are those who may never get on board with your new innovation no matter how hard you work to impress them. Each type of “personality” is different and not everybody is the same personality for each innovation they may encounter in their lives. The important thing is that each personality will exist somewhere in the process and we have to be aware of who they are and what they want in order to get our innovations off the ground.

Now that I have metaphorically talked your ear off about Diffusion of Innovations and the very basics of the theory, how do we apply it and all it encompasses to our jobs as strategic communicators? The biggest, and in my opinion most obvious, takeaway is how important peer-to-peer communications and peer networks are to the development of innovations (see the personality types listed in the above paragraph.)  Without the early adopters and innovators talking with their peers and family members, some of the most innovative stuff to ever happen might not have gone mainstream (think of the iPhone, Facebook, etc. Those spread because people who were first to use them told their friends about them and so on and so forth until everybody now utilizes these two innovations.) It re-establishes the fact that even though we are now officially in the digital age, more “traditional” forms of communication are still the most useful. Talking with others is still the best way to distribute ideas and to invoke change. Thing about your organization that you work for. Do the best innovations come from a memo telling you what to do or do they happen more organically? I know in my personal experience, my company recently transitioned to a new CRM system. While we were all put through the same basic training, after about a month you could clearly see who the early adopters were and how they were helping the early majority, late majority, and laggards understand and utilize this new technology to its fullest potential. Each innovation is different but the personalities who help the innovators achieve the Innovation-Decision Process rarely change.

Hopefully you were able to find something useful in all that! I hope you enjoy the new direction the blog is heading and stick around for the next few weeks to learn even more with me! Have a great week everybody!

Auf Wiedersehen

These past nine weeks have been quite an adventure. I (and I hope you too) have learned so much about emerging media. From social media and networking to how technology affects children growing up today, we’ve dived into it all. My favorite topic I think was crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, and politics. It all tied in so well with what is currently happening in the United States political arena right now. Without citizen journalists would we have known about the impact the Women’s March was going to have? Would we have understood how desperate the situation at Standing Rock was getting? The answer isn’t a black and white “no,” but it’s also not a firm “yes” either.  I think the future of technology, the future of the web, lies in the people who utilize it.  The press is relying more and more on citizen journalists in the wake of their current predicament with the new administration. For the first time ever, people are getting direct, day-to-day updates from the President via Twitter. People are writing more and more about how they feel, how they wish to help, and encouraging others to help as well. As with most things, the power lies with the people and with more data being uploaded every day the web will only improve with time. I personally can’t wait to see what happens next in media.

But, sadly, my journey into emerging media and what that all means for us as professional strategic communicators has come to an end with this post. I have decided to take this project and switch gears for a while. As a result this blog won’t be updated as frequently as it once was but it’ll still be around, don’t worry! I hope you stop by again soon and see where this next journey takes me. Until next time!

A Blessing and a Curse: Children and Technology

This week all of my readings focused on children and technology. How does it affect them? How can we better utilize technology with our kids but also keep them safe? How do kids view technology in their own lives? A lot of research has been done over the past decade or so to dig into this relationship that exists between our kids and their technology. One of the reasons scholars see this as an important area for research is because children are very susceptible to outside influences (mainly friends but sometimes others whom they meet online) and most children are not knowledgeable enough to distinguish between a friend or somebody out to hurt them online. They aren’t properly equipped to deal with maliciousness delivered through technology and this raises a lot of questions for adults and parents alike on how to keep kids safe. There are a ton of benefits to raising kids with technology. A great example that I think about is one of my four year old nephew’s toys. He is learning how to creatively problem solve with this really cool toy called the Code-a-pillar.

 It's essentially a caterpillar made up of removable segments that tell the toy where to go. Some segments make it go forward, others to the left or right. The child arranges and rearranges the segments making the caterpillar's path change each time to move about the room in any way they want to. They can even make it go around obstacles like my little nephew does! These toys are dependent on technology and yet they're teaching him some valuable skills.  Now this same nephew also knows how to navigate YouTube on my phone to find his favorite Halloween movie about Curious George. There’s definitely an act of balance that has to take place with kids and their technology and for the most part this balance is fairly easy to achieve…until that child turns about 12 or 13 and discovers the fun that is social media.

Social media is the big bad in the world of technology for both children and their parents. In some households, it’s a nightly source of arguing and bickering. “Don’t Snapchat at the table!” is something I’ve heard shouted quite often by parents while out to dinner. It keeps them connected but at what cost? Most parents view cellphones and the myriad apps that come with them as both a blessing and a curse. A 2008 study of 60 families with young people aged 11-17 and their parents revealed that both children and parents “regardless of geographical location (urban or rural) – considered that mobile phones were a benefit to young people, and helped to keep them safe.” (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) In the event of any type of emergency, cell phones and certain apps are useful and vital to have. Apps like SafeTrek (https://www.safetrekapp.com/) are designed to help anybody feel safe by opening and holding down your finger on the app screen. If you lift up your finger and don’t enter your security pin it will automatically notify police of your location and send a type of “distress signal.” I used a similar version of this app when I was in undergrad and I always felt so much better for having it. This proves the “blessing” part of phones and technology being ever present in kid’s lives. It allows parents to feel connected to their kids when they can’t be there.

Now on to the “curse” bit. Technology is a huge distraction in everyday life, not just for children but adults as well. The average American devotes more than ten hours to screen time a day and that number threatens to grow (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/health/americans-screen-time-nielsen/.) With all that time looking at a screen and being focused on social media, kids are focused more and more on maintaining those social profiles and making sure they fit in. Adolescence is already a fraught time. You have mood swings, you’re conflicted about risky behaviors you or your friends may be experiencing, and fights with parental figures is an almost constant. Online can be a form of escape for many kids during this time. Empirical evidence has even suggested that “self-disclosure through online communication can enhance the quality” of friendships children can have with each other(Coming of Age Online: The Developmental Underpinnings of Girls’ Blogs.) In a lot of cases, it can seem like social media is all about the “me” factor for youths but in actuality it’s much more about the “we.” In Sonia Livingstone’s article Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation she states that “social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’.”  Basically it’s more about the group mentality and “fitting in” than it is about standing out and that group mentality can have some pretty harsh consequences.

As we all know, either from experience or from watching others, kids can be mean to each other. It’s yet another part of adolescence and growing up.  Cyberbullying is a huge part of children’s lives and experiences on social media. Nearly 43% of kids have been bullied online and 1 in 4 has had it happen more than once (https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-cyber-bullying.) Kids know this is happening, and some participate in it just because their friends are and they don’t want to be next. It’s a very serious issue and one that needs a lot more time and attention paid to it before we can really begin to solve it. It’s a huge “curse” of being online as an adolescent. However, happiness can be found in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light (if you got that this was a Harry Potter reference, ten points to your house!) A point of light in all this cyberbullying darkness is that technology is allowing kids to discuss serious issues with their parents or parental figures through technology. There has been a huge uptick in kids communicating with parents via text or social media messenger apps about serious topics like cyberbullying. Many LGBTQ+ children broach coming out to their parents first by bringing it up via text or social media, and even teen pregnancy has been known to be brought to parents attention via text (The Role of Mobile Phones in Family Communication.) Technology has allowed children to feel comfortable enough to communicate with just about anybody, but that also includes the people who care about and love them the most: their parents.

I don’t have children yet, but I found this week’s reading to be very informational and I will definitely remember it as I move forward with my own family someday. Only one more week left before we take the blog in a different direction. See you guys then!

Sources:

Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy, and self-expression.” New Media and Society, Vol. 10, Issue 3, 2008, 393-411.

Davis, Katie. “Coming of age online: The developmental underpinnings of girls' blogs.” Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2010, 145-171.

Devitt, Kevin & Roker, Debi. “The role of mobile phones in family communication.” Children & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 3, 2009, 189–202.