The Legend of Taylor Johnson

If you haven't heard about the viral video getting all the attention these days here's your chance! The Legend of Taylor Johnson is now up on Youtube and everyone has the opportunity to participate in the phenomenon that's sweeping the world. A lot of work went into the production of this epic-ness including two days of shooting and many hours of editing. Each of us put a lot of effort into making this video great so sending it on to all your friends sure does mean a lot to us! Enjoy!

Questioning Success

In the last Chapter of "A Survival Guide to Social Media" Deltina Hay outlines some different systems such as Google Analytics and Google Trends to determine the success of one's website or blog. While these ways are interesting quantitative avenues that allow you to see how statistically well your platform is being represented, I think the more exciting part of the chapter was the section where Deltina outlined the ways in which you could qualitatively examine how effectively your website is being viewed.

To me it is one thing to have your platform seen by many viewers and it is another for your platform to have a significant impact on those who take the time to visit or listen to what you have to say. However, instead of the naturally intuitive way of measuring your qualitative success, by trying to create answers out of your questions, Deltina suggests that you try to create questions out of your knowledge. This allows you to not only help you analyze what you've created by extracting solid information, but also allows you to move forward by thinking about what you can do to help improve your platform.

This is where a quantitative analysis just doesn't stack up in comparison. It can't tell you how you should go about improving your voice and your platform, only whether you need to. As a blogger it is everyone's responsibility to their audience to concern themselves with quality over quantity.

The Past Makes the Future

After reading chapter four in Citizen Marketers it occurred to me that it is only natural for there to be a transitional people for people and ideas under the consumption of world changing technology. In chapter four the authors discussed how the ramifications of the printing press, television, and internet have evolved over time. The printing press changed the world order with the switch from the spoken word of religions to the written word of governments. The television changed everyone when the vote of public opinion switched from the newspaper to the voice and image found on advertisements. Now we see the disbursement of news and announcements from traditional press releases to digital compositions.

As we discussed in class the future of press releases lies in the author's ability to take the old version of a simple static release and transform it into an informative, link filled conglomeration. In this way we find the press release to not only be more useful and fact-filled it also achieves the objective of being more social.

Here we find an example video of the new version of the press release.

Why have people taken so long to adopt this new version of press releases?

I think that the answer lies in that we are still in the transitional period that we have seen before in television and the printing press. However, in today's fast paced, instant update world we forget that it takes time for people's processes and habits to change. So to me the effects of the new press releases will be seen eventually but we shouldn't be entirely surprised that this transitional period is occurring.