Journal review 25: Impact of New Media and Technology on Customer Relationships

By Siti Nurarbayah Ibrahim 2009994875

A new media marketing world increasingly dominated by mobile technologies, "shopping bots," recommendation systems and peer-to-peer networks has spawned a radical new online marketplace, challenging the old behaviors of buyers and sellers.

The old straight line that governed customer relationship management has been replaced by a zig-zagging pathway that more closely resembles a game of pinball which is with risks and rewards waiting for companies that wade into the online marketplace, according to an international team of researchers in the journal's latest edition.

Making use of these opportunities and avoiding their respective dangers requires a thorough understanding of why consumers are attracted to new media and how they influence consumers attitudes and behaviors and new strategic and tactical marketing approaches must match the characteristics of new media and their effects on customers.

Social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter give customers a bigger role as market players capable of reaching and being reached by almost everyone, anywhere and anytime, according to the authors. Armed with the tools of the Internet, consumers serve as retailers on eBay, producers on YouTube, authors on Wikipedia and critics on Amazon.com.

Further challenging companies in a fast-changing landscape, a personal computer is no longer the base from which customers make decisions. Instead, smart phones, laptops and far-reaching personal portals like Twitter and Facebook have made real-time information exchange an integral element of consumer behavior without restriction to time of day or location.

While these new media are displacing long-established business models and corporate strategies, they also provide new and exciting opportunities for companies to improve customer relationships and expand businesses through strategies that adapt to this constantly changing new media era.

source: http://www.sciencedaily.com

Journal Review 24: Brave New World of Public Relation

by Nur Sukainah Mansor

This journal is about the changes of Public Relation practice since World Ward II until now. There’s changes from aspect such as publics with which practitioners communicate, internal and external communication channel happened, sources from which publics obtain information, results sought by clients, employer and practitioners and way in which those result are measured. 

The magnitude of these changes happened also is big and we can see the vocabulary changes occurred in concert with socioeconomic, demographic and technological changes that shaped the development of public relations practice. Even the media such as newspaper, radio and even television has been affected by these changes. 

Even during this time, publicity was the primary focus of public relations. Practitioner prepared and distributes news releases to news outlets at a pace that today would at best be considered lethargic. Through much of 1960s, public relation followed an information paradigm. The traditionally secretive ways of most organizations were supplanted by a new philosophy of openness.

Deterioration in the quality of public education however spawned growing numbers of functional illiterates and continues to contribute to progressive deterioration in mass media audiences. Other factors driving the process include growing numbers of new media spawned by emerging technologies, fragmentation of audiences across new and traditional media and fundamental shift from supply-push to demand-pull in the world of information.

The latter factor is especially significant in that it represents a quantum change in the ways individuals obtain information. Traditional mass media have gathered and packaged information and offered it for sale to consumers (supply-push). Today information consumers use the Internet, computer databases, and information supplies such as Google and Yahoo to obtain information as needed. We can see now that demand-pull has become the dominant form of information acquisition.

Especially in this technologies world where everything is needed as it is, one need to have skill in using the gadget in order to practice as  apublic relation practitioner more efficiently. We can see these happened with the  creation of new media press releases and much more.

source: E W Brody, Public Relations Quarterly, 2005

Journal Review 23 : Online Social Network

Social networking sites are the latest online communication tool that allows users to create a public or semi-public profile, create and view their own as well as the other users’ online social networks (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), and interact with people in their networks.

A website or social network can be our own magazine or gallery where anything that can be put unto word, pictures, video or music can be put here. This is what making the Internet fantastic and it still is. According to Gauntlett & Horsley (2004), the web offers people an opportunity to produce creative, expressive media product (text, art works, anything that you prefer) and display them to a global audience.

According to Pfeil & Zaphiris (2009), a social network is a comprised of actors and ties that link to the actors. Actors here can be the people, nations, organizations and many more that are link by ties which indicate a relation between one another. The links between different actors can be based on different characteristics that based on the affiliation or the exchange of resources.

Boyd &Ellison (2007) also agrees that social network site is very unique that it not that they only allow individuals to meet strangers but they enable the users to communicate and make visible their social networks with each other around the world. We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share connections and the nature of these connections may vary from site to site.

Everything is now just a finger tips away. The uses of these sites have limited the use of the old media as the revolution has changed the view of the society in communication whereas they are now more comfortable using the online sites to socialize with each other, not necessarily meeting new people but they are primarily communicating with people who are already part of the extended network. However, there are some parents decide to place the internet connection in a public room in order to monitor their children’s internet use afraid that it could harm their children.

by: Tengku Rashidah