Week 1: Emily Priebe Response to Readings

Many of our texts focus on how transmedia can enact social justice. Coming from a marketing background, I’m particularly interested in thinking about how transmedia can influence consumers as well. Henry Jenkins in the Google Hangout defined transmedia as “the relationship between different media platforms and practices.” For me, there lies the crux of the challenge in marketing. We have many platforms available to us, and we need to participate in many of them to keep our brands relevant. But how do we honor the authenticity of our brand voice?

As a content strategist I deal with spinning one piece of content into many. A case study can turn into a blog post on the case study, a Facebook post, a tweet, a post on LinkedIn in a professional group, a piece of static content on a website. All of these platforms have different audiences and different goals for each piece of content, but must stay within the overall umbrella of the brand voice. When sharing content, I try and frame it in different ways for each platform. Also in the Google Hangout, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser said, “You have to go to where the audience is, and that means you have to be on multiple platforms.” The struggle is deciding which platforms are relevant for the brand I represent. I think companies struggle today when they just decide to jump on every single new platform that comes along without really thinking about how it fits into their overall strategic brand goals and how it fits in with a brand’s history.

One of the points that struck me most about the Precious Places project was the emphasis on preserving the organizations’ history. The videos highlight how important the preservation of an organization’s history is to its future, very similar to how honoring a brand’s history is important in future communications. You have to blend past and future in a way that will capture the attention of modern and more tech savvy audiences.

 

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5 comments to Week 1: Emily Priebe Response to Readings

  • banders3@uoregon.edu

    Good point with the historical perspective on the Precious Places videos. Both videos showed a ton of old pictures about how things were back then and basically that the community was the thing back then. One thing that I thought they could have hit on more was (instead of just taking the viewer down memory lane) was how that history impacts the future. In the case of the Nile Swim Club, they just kind of said that they were in financial trouble and the club might shut down, but they really didn’t talk much about how future communities could benefit from this club.

  • abk@uoregon.edu

    That Kaiser quote is interesting because it ironically marks the difficulty of reaching your target audience in a time when there are so many platforms to do so. Despite there being a multitude of different ways for your audience to find your story, many people get all their information from only one platform – be it a TV channel, a website, or a twitter feed. This means that now you essentially need to fully diversify your spread on different platforms or else you may miss out on a substantial portion of your target audience. It’s funny, because it makes you realize that in the earliest history of human interaction it was actually easier to fully reach your target demographic since everyone was getting their information from the same isolated source.

  • mplett@uoregon.edu

    Diversity in platforms may be necessary to reach certain groups, but sometimes your audience may really only be in or two places. For example, the union I work for represents a membership that supports our choice to engage them largely through Facebook. We use Twitter, but it’s not our focus because our members simply aren’t there in any numbers. Of course, it’s important to constantly monitor your audience because they won’t remain in one place forever. But trying to be everywhere at once is exhausting, so tools like member surveys, etc., are very important.

    • epriebe@uoregon.edu

      Michael, you bring up a really good point. Not all platforms are going to reach your audience, but may be important for creating engagement throughout different parts of communications cycle or sales cycle. For example, although Twitter may not be where most of your audience is, it can be a great platform for creating awareness for your organization if you’re making an effort to engage with other users and organizations by starting a dialogue. If you look at the traditional marketing funnel, you can create different pieces of content on various platforms for each stage: awareness, engagement, consideration, purchase.

  • Rakhaditya

    Yeaa you draw between the Precious Places project and the importance of preserving an organization’s history is insightful. Highlighting the parallel between preserving history in a digital storytelling project and honoring a brand’s history in marketing communications is a powerful analogy. Your emphasis on blending past and future to captivate modern and tech-savvy audiences reflects a keen awareness of the evolving nature of communication strategies.

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